Water is increasingly scarce and precious, so Dal-Tile takes many steps to help ensure that the element is preserved. Today, five of the manufacturer’s facilities recycle and reuse 100 percent of the wastewater generated through manufacturing and the company is working towards the goal of zero discharge of process wastewater.

“Our goal has always been to minimize the amount of water waste that we generate from our processes,” said Robert Hurt, director of environmental health and safety at Dal-Tile. “The less water we generate is the less fresh water we have to purchase or draw from our wells.”

The amount of wastewater generated and recovered fluctuates based on the amount of tile produced. In 2012, Dal-Tile recovered more than 83 million gallons of wastewater from manufacturing processes in all of its plants in the United States and Monterey, Mexico. From 2001 to 2012, the company recovered 1 billion gallons of waste.

Tile requires water to make it. Water is mixed with the raw clay to form a wet slurry before it is pumped into a larger dryer and then extruded or pressed into shape.

“We do use quite a bit of water in our operations for floor and wall tiles,” Hurt said. “What we’ve done is we’ve designed our plants over the years to collect all of that waste water from glaze application and the body preparation.”

Dal-Tile reduced demand for fresh water from city systems at its plants in Fayette, Alabama and Lewisport, Kentucky. In 2010, the Fayette plant installed a system to collect all wastewater from its roof-mounted evaporative coolers. In Lewisport, incoming and discharge piping was modified in the milling department to recover once-through cooling water that was previously discharged to the plant drainage system. In both Fayette and Lewisport, the recovered wastewater is used in place of fresh water to control the moisture content of the tile body prior to extrusion.

The majority of the wastewater collected comes from the glaze application process and it is reused to make the slurry in future batches of tile. “The wastewater from glaze applications only has glaze materials in it and not a lot of solid waste materials, so it does not impact the quality of the tile,” Hurt said. “It is all gray but it typically doesn’t color the slurry.”

There was one situation in wall preparation where the glaze wastewater did adversely impact the pressed tile to the point where the finished tile was not the correct color after glazing. Hurt said the team was able to correct the problem by layering the tile before the glaze. “It’s not without its issues, but we manage it,” Hurt added.

The amount of water recovered and reused is fixed by production. “If a facility for some reason is generating more wastewater than they need, then we will try to do other things with it,” Hurt said.

For example, Dal-Tile makes quarry tile in its Louisville, Ky., facility, which does not require that as much water in its manufacturing process, and wastewater is pumped into a small pond and is used for irrigating vegetation on the land around the plant.

“If we can’t use it again in manufacturing, we do attempt to reuse it in other ways,” Hurt said.